


Explicarium

by Kit



Category: Monster Blood Tattoo Series - D. M. Cornish
Genre: F/F, Gift Fic, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-24
Updated: 2010-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-12 04:13:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/120629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kit/pseuds/Kit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is one in the mercantile warren of Brandenbrass whom the Branden Rose would call friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bitterblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitterblue/gifts).



> Factotum spoilers! Be warned! Keep back!

**Explicarium**

 _2010_

 “Dearest, are you _expecting_ someone? We can always call for tea.”

The dry, drawing-room tones brought the Duchess in Waiting of Naimes back into herself. With a long, slow shudder that moved the length of her, Europe shifted herself, taking the Lady Madigan’s face between long, slim hands. If her mien had been another’s, it might have seemed rueful.

“It seems,” she said diffidently, “That I am not myself.”

“Clearly.”  The smaller fulgar shrugged, pulling her face away, and Europe smiled.

“Sorrow-eyed, I called you in Sinster, and—“

“—and a midget-boned bint, and a knife-begotten—”

“—and many other things besides, until you showed me otherwise.” Their hands were rejoined, now, the Marchess of Pike tracing her fingers over the neat rows of cruorpunxis with the cheerful, familiar confidence of someone who has taken account of all another’s possible—and fierce—objections by deciding not to care. “You _do_ go on.”

It was Madigan’s turn to smile, full lips gently curved and pale in the low glimmer  of Phoebë’s light through a shared window pane. “I think you had a point, dearest, before you interrupted yourself?” She sat up, taking much of the sheet with her.

Europe, baleful and naked, sniffed. “ _You_ interrupted me, you’ll find.”

“I am sure. _Europa_.”

“Sorrow-eyed, I called you, but you could glare with fair fire even then.” So sighed the Branden Rose: a rather delicate sound, pitched to the room and the other lazhar’s bare back. “And you look all too _knowing_ at me, my dear, for someone who’s hardly had cause to know me _lately_ , at all.”

It had always been the way of these two: words warm and elliptical between them.

Madigan shifted, returning bed linens and a warm arm to Europe’s shoulders. “Your surprises are what save me from a life of shrivelled boredom between the monsters,” she said. “I do not mind the journey of finding out, so long as I may.”

Europe arched a brow. “I am your lexicon?”

“My perigrinat, rather.” The Marchess let her hand slide lower, careful along the spine, skirting scars that even the most skilled of surgeons could not avoid, if one was to be fully transmogrified on their tables. She kept her voice low, yet light. “Somewhat antiquarian in nature, and without explicarium.”

“Ah, hush and ground you.”

“You rather missedyour chance to quell me proper.” Madigan shook her head as Europe spluttered, her hand undistracted from its patterns.  “You must pay the toll, now.”

The Branden Rose smiled thinly, shifting beneath the slight woman’s touch. “ _Must I_? Indeed. The last who asked any toll from me met something of a sad and painful end. There were cliffs involved. Some vaulting.”

“That sounds fascinatingly recent,” Madigan murmured. “But I would know the story behind your smiles. It seems they come easier, now.”

This startled laugh from the fulgar, sitting up in her turn to eye the dark haired woman sprawled languorously in a bed just that perfect space of too large, her hand now splayed against the dark sheets. 

 “Between you and Rossamünd,” she said quietly, “I cannot seem to help myself.”

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

“Rossamünd? _Rossam_ _ünd...”_ Madigan sighed the name, and Europe’s laughter flustered deep in her throat, so it fell out of her choking and ungentle.  “You speak so often of such a _little_ figure.”

“You haven’t met the m—”

“I,” said the Machess, always comfortable with using a shared bed as an excuse to interrupt, “have heard rumours.”

“Tish tosh.” Europe smirked, skating her hand lightly over Madigan’s small breasts and slight arms, bird-boned and fragile, next to her own chord. An easy grasp with long fingers, her wrists were caught in one hand, colour and shadow making strange shapes between them as one woman leant in and the other away.

“ _Not_ so—uh—little, then?”

“I was going to bring him tonight. _There_ , now. Don’t fuss.” She smirked into the small astrapecrith’s pale skin, now damp with sweat as Europe darted her tongue between her breasts.

“If I’d known, I’d have informed Threedice.”

“He hoards you _dreadfully_ , my dear.”  The Duchess-daughter cried softly, sudden, as sparks numbed her questing mouth.

“And you do not?” Madigan beamed through her breathlessness, the sunny expression shafting through her cloud-eyes, brief and hot as Europe looked up at her with swollen lips.

“ _You_ both love and cannot stand to be shared.”

One hand still encircling Madigan’s wrists, the fulgar let her other drag and slide across the woman’s body, claiming with every taut finger and graze of her palm. There were scars they shared, these two, and more that told other tales. Europe remembered the satisfaction of seeing the nicker who had flayed the Marchess’s hip laid in his turn at both their feet: a twin arching effort, Madigan’s eyes fierce even as she had to hold to the waist of the Branden Rose, and there had more blood on the ground than her face. Not even Licurius had shared that memory, nor the kiss after it: their first, glorious above the gore.  

No blood, now, but still softness and giving flesh and the rich scent of this room, and these joys, as Europe teased her, and eased into her, fingers crooked. She narrowed her eyes to slits, happy at the wet, slick noises and the small whimpers Madigan could not help for all the silver in their world. They were as unchanged as that first kiss.

“You would _like_ if I brought him, I do believe.” The Branden Rose let her voice skate across the dense air, so Madigan would strain to hear it. “He would be _shocked_ , you see.”

“I don’t—”

“Wide-eyed and wild-eyed, because the sight you would make for him is _everything_ he cannot just now imagine. He reads _trash_ , but he does not—”

“ _This_ ,” Madigan laughed around her outrage, her own hand driving fast into the fine, curled mess of the lazhar’s unpinned hair, “Is not trash.”

“No, sweet. It’s pornography.” Answering laughter curled quick and warm around her smile. “There is a difference.” 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Madigan finds her perigrinat is rather a work in progress.

They were both quiet, after. This had not been Europe’s wont, though _little sad eyes_ , her teasing refrain for the pale woman whose hair, now, spread long and shining across the linens, had started from a nocturnal involvement.  They had been much younger, then, though they might still enumerate the span of years on one pair of hands. The Marchess of Pike—a Lady only, then—had laughed to be so touched, but cried at her surprise in the languor of what follows such things. She had lain in a bed not dissimilar to this four-poster, gauze of crimson dying her skin, and said, very serious, that she now knew what it was to die, if only a little.

Europe had thrown a pillow at her.

Now, as the Duchess-in-Waiting looked to the state of her clothing, cast aside in hurry but lovingly attended to by the ‘Bout Houses her friend had trained so well, so that she might re-vest herself with little worry and pleats freshly pressed, Europe felt her own quietness. And it was bile, to flood her mouth.  She stood, naked still, and did not look back at the bed she had left, or the woman in it.

“Something displeases you.”

A small smile for that. “Something _always_ displeases me. It is not you,” she added, as the silence stretched. “I am weary, is all, and would rather stay and sleep than make me way back to the creaking home.”

“You have always been a crazed architect.” Madigan’s laughter had always been a gift rarely given, and the astrepecrith was glad both to provoke it, and that she herself might be warmed by such gifts. “If you find your embroideries and spires too pressing, simply remain here.”

“The boy shall have found trouble, doubtless.” The sigh of the Branden Rose was fond. “It is best that I _remain_ where I might be easily found, and so asses it.”

“You’re hardly his _mother_.”

Europe shuddered. “Never that. But, my dear, you misapprehend his _propensity_ for trouble.”

“And you already Trouble’s greatest debtor.”

“You have always given me too much credit.”

 “Ha! Not enough, I fear.”

The pun was too small for their laughter, and the Duchess-daughter gazed upon her waiting wardrobe in high disfavour, while it died in her mouth and at her back.  

“I have you, Rose, if there is ever a need.”

Europe turned enough to see over her shoulder, through the frizzed fall of her hair. “Doubtless, peerlet.” She swallowed love with her bile and felt her mood shift, slick and silver and impossible to still, beneath her skin, in the cracks of her bones, her vile organs. Her stomach was tight, clenched against herself, within herself, the nausea that this very woman understood as her own due showing sudden and ghastly across her face. “ _Doubtless_. You _have_ no doubt, Madigan, and I have never seen how this may be so. Do you not _think_ , with your bright mind, of what we both _chose_ to become?”

The arc, when it came, was not deathly. It could never be, to her, but Europe felt restraint even with this knowledge, felt the holding back, the repression of true force before her mind blanked and her spine fizzed and her fingers became the shattered insides of themselves, her shape lost to sensation, her heart and her blood and breath caught a place that could be conceived as _somewhere else_ in a world crackled before eyes that were no longer there.

  She came back to the catch and gasp of her own breathing, bent forward, hands on her knees. The other lahzar had not stirred from the bed, seemed barely winded. Madigan’s gifts had always tended to subtlety.

“ _You_ —”

“—know how dangerous hysteria might make you. How rare that is. I shall not see you undone.”

Europe groaned, ragged and small, “I who am so _well_ made? That is the problem. It eats at me. Monstrous.” She felt her words blur, edges still uncertain in the dark, small space of her mouth. “I forgive you, for I have hurt you the worse.”

“No, you don’t.”

This smile hurt. An aching curve to pinched, paled lips. “No,” she returned. “But I shall. I must see to the boy.”

 The Marchess of Pike nodded, hair tumbling forward, her blue eyes sharp, aware. “I do not think you monstrous,” she said, very slowly. “I do not think this _process_ we go through, vile as it is, can do that. If you have mind that is yours, and unsullied—”

“— _unsullied_.” The Branden Rose barked her laughed. “And what if you were finding yourself discussing philosophy and The Good with some ichor-flooded creature brought up from the heaving, heated depths? What _then_ , my pure one? How would you stand in that knowledge?”

Madigan’s hands folded, and the Duchess-daughter could not read what flashed in that pale, familiar gaze, through strived for it. “It was,” she whispered, “Perhaps a dangerous thing, to claim you my perigrinat.”

“You rescind—”

“—Hush. A _dangerous_ thing, but not untrue. And my mind, bright as you claim it, cannot be overstill.” Europe watched as her friend let these words fall from her lips and into the world, newborn and flighty, between them. She could not speak.

“I would change my definition of sedorning, should be presented with evidence to force me so. No small thing, but not impossible. I can see that.”

“Be _careful_ with what you say.”

“Oh, I shall.” Madigan smiled, running her thumb over the spoor etched into her chin. “I have your back, and hold my own peace.”

“ _Peace_ ,” Europe sniffed. “Fie and dash to such a slippery thing.”

The Pugnator -Marchess shook her pretty head.  “I have always been better at falling than you. You are learning to do what I have practised from some ten-and-five.”

“Since we met.” Sardonic heaviness. Europe groped for her chemise.

  “That time, amongst others. “

Magidan drew her arms about her knees, and her knees to her chest. “I do think, my heart,” she said, and Europa of Naimes was unsure if it were grace, or its utter lack, that kept her friend’s sky eyes upon her face, “That you have been very frightened. And shall be again.”

“Your _heart_ may quiver and quail all it likes,” Europe snapped, stepping closer to the bed to find her boots. “It shall have no bearing.”

 She let her eyes fall closed as Madigan brushed a thumb over her sharp cheek, matching spark-to-spark. The fulgarine’s words came out in a low exclamation, breathy and sad.

“But you see, my dear, what we both know is that a very little bit of you _is_ my heart.”

The Branden Rose felt her lids tighten further shut against this silliness. “I shall not listen.”

A light brush of a kiss, and tears that flashed near blue on the Marchess’s face, she was still so charged. Europe glared.

“Just be _still_ , be _silent._ Share _nothing_.”

 “I shall hold my piece, and do my best to cling to some of yours.”

Another kiss, before Madigan stood, and tenderly shook out magenta coat.


End file.
